Pilv, Aare

Aare Pilv, born in 1976, is a literature researcher, writer and translator. He has published six poetry books and a prose book, researched mainly Estonian literature and the function of poetic techniques in construction of personal and collective identity.
He has translated mainly from Russian (Russian avantgardists of the 1920s, Lev Rubinstein, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sergei Zavyalov, contemporary Estonian and Latvian Russian-language poets), but also from German (Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Bernhard Widder).

Beekman, Vladimir

Vladimir Beekman was an Estonian writer and translator, born 23. 8. 1929 in Tallinn, where he died on 3. 10. 2009.

He was evacuated to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1941 and survived the blockade of the city.

Studied at the Technical College of Tallinn, where he graduated in 1953 as professional chemical and mining engineer. Since 1956 he worked professionally as a writer. First book publication in 1952. With a total of 38 published books in Estonian, including poetry collections, novels, travelogues, children's books, memoirs, film manuscripts, he has been translated into 11 foreign languages. Various literary and essayistical articles in the press. Beekman worked as a translator from Germanic and Slavic languages since 1953. All in all he published 150 literary works and 12 plays from Swedish, Danish, German, Dutch, Russian and Czech, including authors like Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Otfried Preussler or Alexander Tvardovsky.

He has been nominated among the best translators in the field of children's literature by the jury of the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1993. During the years 1983-1995 he was chairman of the Writers' Union of Estonia.

Wuolijoki, Hella

Hella Wuolijoki (born in 1886 as Ella Marie Murrik in Ala, Helme parish, Estonia) grew up in Valga, a small border town in South-Estonia which in those days was still under the command of Imperial Russia. Yet, the seeds of active national thought had been sown many decades ago and the Murriks with their forefathers residing in Viljandi, one of the centres of the national movement, were no exception. Wuolijoki spent her school years in Tartu, being enrolled to the local Pushkin Grammar School for Girls. She was an active pupil, kept an eye on the socio-politic movements, and held contact with local cultural and communal leaders which all led to the publishing of her first article in the Estonian newspaper Postimees already in the summer of 1903. It was difficult for girls to acquire higher education in the Baltic region which is why Wuolijoki decided to continue her studies in Helsinki, at that point – in 1904, one year before the Russian Revolution of 1905 – unaware of the fact that Finland was going to shelter her for the rest of her life.
In 1908 she graduated from the Folkloristic Department at the University of Helsinki with a thesis on an Estonian folk song called Ema haual (“On mother’s grave”) supervised by Prof. Kaarle Krohn. Further research was suggested by the Finnish Literary Society as Wuolijoki was commissioned to classify and develop a register on different types of folk songs collected by the Estonian folklorist Jakob Hurt. This project was suspended in 1914 with the breaking out of World War I.
The following years brought great changes in Wuolijoki’s life: marriage, children, and career in wood industry with a whole factory town built for economic purposes on the Karelian-Soviet border in Suojärve, first pieces in Finnish, international success with the play Niskavuoren Naiset (“The Women of Niskavuori”, 1936) as well as politically tense excursions. Already in the early 1920s Wuolijoki settled down in the estate of Marlebäck which is also where she became acquainted with Bertolt Brecht in the summer of 1940.

The central themes of her fictional works date back to the years at the turn of the century in South-Estonia where the newly arisen intellectual and economical elite constituted part of the society never been present before. Another central topic has been the conflict between duty and love. Her pseudonyms have been Juhani Tervapää and Felix Tuli. She died in 1954. 

Kross, Jaan

coming soon

Laanes, Eneken

Eneken Laanes was born in Äksi, Estonia, in 1972. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Tartu and has been visiting scholar at the University of Bologna, the Free University of Berlin and a Juris Padegs Research Fellow at Yale University.
Nowadays she works as a senior research fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at Tallinn University.
She has published a book on the Estonian contemporary novel in the post-Soviet memory culture (Unresolved Dialogues: Subjectivity and Memory in Post-Soviet Estonian Novel / in Estonian /, 2009) and edited a collection of articles dedicated to the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross. Her current research focuses on history in fiction and on the politics of literature after the ethical turn. She is co-ed. of: Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, 2015

 

 

Kangur, Sigrid

Sigrid Tooming, former Kangur, studied English philology and Scandinavian languages at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She translated the following Norwegian authors: Johan Borgen, Tarjei Vesaas, Dag Solstad, Kjell Askildsen, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbø and Linn Ullmann.